Overwhelmed With Wine Pleasure

My search is finally over. I have tasted hundreds of Oregon Pinot Noirs. I have purchased and cellared thousands of dollars in Oregon Pinot Noir. Top quality Oregon juice can run you $85-$125 or so from producers like Ken Wright, Archery Summit, Beaux Feres and Joseph Drouhin. The good “entry-level” stuff costs about $28-$35 -- at that price range I happen to enjoy producers like Cristom, Coattails, Big Farm Table and Bergstrom.   

A great thing about Oregon Pinot Noir is that there is a lot of adequate buys in the market from vintage to vintage. My goal is to sort through all of that to find the exceptional stuff.  Usually I conduct this research on our annual trip to Willamette Valley Oregon, Memorial weekend, when most of the wineries are open to the public.

On this occasion, I was home for the evening with my fiancé Danielle, when I decided to grab a bottle from my personal collection to go with dinner. At the last second of my indecisiveness, while staring at a wall of Pinot Noir, I grabbed a bottle of Oregon Gamay Noir that I had purchased from a local wine merchant several months prior. A rarity in the US, Gamay is a grape that is stylistically similar to Pinot Noir; equally suited to grow in the same climate’s as Pinot; but having a lesser reputation due to it’s often stylistic simplicity (the Beaujoilas Nouveau holiday wine boom in the 1980’s and 1990’s didn’t help it’s status either). 

Although relatively new to the market place, my bottle of choice was from a fairly well known winery named, Evening Land. At first sip this wine became the most significant bottling that I may have ever encountered in my 5 years of consuming Oregon wine, and turned my light bodied Oregon red wine research on it’s head! The 2011 Seven Springs Gamay Noir was priced at just $20. I will be rushing back out tomorrow morning to purchase more--you may want do the same. 

If you blind tasted me and told me it was top quality Burgundy, I would have no problem believing you. While this Gamay might not be more complex than some Oregon or French Pinots, it may be the most well made wine in Oregon. I can’t get over the focus that this wine has. The cranberry, cherry skin and pomegranate flavors are absolutely precise. I can quite easily pick up on the herbaceous whole cluster qualities that help contribute to this wine’s delicate structure. It has me wanting to compare it to a violin. As it opens up well into the second hour in the decantor, a lovely perfumed rose pedal like texture and flavor is slowly building in volume and sound. The acidity on this wine is absolutely perfect. It’s nice to see something that can play in the same league as top dollar Oregon Pinot Noir, for this little charmer will forever be my benchmark Oregon wine.